A curious coffee
This will be the first in a series of blogs regarding an application I’ve recently developed at Companies House called Curious Coffee. I’ll try and keep this one high level and non-technical, and hopefully have some other posts go into more technical detail. Side note: I’m going to refer a lot to Companies House during this blog, so from hereon in I’ll be referring to it as CH.
I guess the best place to begin is to explain the premise of it and why I even created it. Curious Coffee is an initiative that was created to help break down silos between departments and help bring people together. CH is currently going through a large Transformation programme, and one part of this Transformation is examining the existing culture we have what could change.
Culture, according to Google definition, “is the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society” — And what is a better way to identify what could change about CH culture than by asking the people that work here? A series of workshops were held that got people from across CH to say what they liked, what they didn’t like, and what they think could be improved regarding the culture we have here. One of the major themes that came out of these workshops was that people felt silo’d in their roles and their day-to-day jobs — enter Curious Coffee.
Curious Coffee is not a new idea and has existed in other forms across various companies of all shapes and sizes. For example, Ryan Holmes (founder and CEO of Hootsuite) wrote a great blog on changing company culture through coffee. Curious Coffee follows the same principles, tailored to CH. It’s a simple three-step process:
- Sign up using your name, email address and department
- Wait a bit
- Get matched with a random person from a different department and go get a coffee (or your preferred choice of beverage)
In development, we get half a day every week dedicated to innovation time. It’s meant to help us refine our own skills, as well as helping CH in various ways — there could be a process improvement opportunity to help streamline something we do for example, or some improvements to legacy systems, things like that. I used my time to create Curious Coffee. I worked with the person responsible for leading on culture change within CH, gathering requirements and tailoring the application to what would really work for CH.
Helping to facilitate ways to break down silos appealed greatly to me. At time of writing, I’ve been at CH for almost 2 years, and outside of the Digital section, I barely have any idea of what the departments do! Since being involved with the culture change community, this has changed. Being around like-minded people who want to help change the culture here, I’ve met people from all around the organisation, learning about different departments, their responsibilities, and some of the culture issues that they are facing within their departments.
It’s also helped me pick up a new programming language. Curious Coffee is written in Node.js, a language that was recently approved for use at CH, so it was a perfect opportunity to start learning it.
Curious Coffee was launched three weeks ago at time of writing, and has already had over 80 people sign up (close to 1/10th of the organisation) and has had two rounds of matching take place. The feedback has been great — for example, two people met up and discussed how their departments work, and discovered they are quite different. As a result, they’re going to be spending some time in each others departments, seeing if there is anything they can pick up to utilise within their own department, or point out to help improve that department.
There’s not a single magic silver bullet that will stop the feeling of being silo’d, but hopefully an idea as simple as Curious Coffee can help break down those silos and help people feel more connected.
